When dieting is the path to your diamond…

Following the breadcrumbs left by my dreams, they have come ever clearer a well where to look for what is new in myself. It is here where I found the diet as diamond… but how could a diet be a diamond if …. A diet is a diet…??

At the time when the diamond took shape, I had been for a couple of years on a diet. That diet had taken away the obese part of me. On one hand it was about that measurable weight in kilo- or pounds that went away. But also about the excess I was carrying as if it were a huge house. I guess as others I would notice it, but could not acknowledge it, lest the cloud of annoyance, frustration, desperation, explanations, or mere bad temper took the best of me.

That diet had come as an answer to: ‘why am I fat and not like ‘normal’ people? Normal as in “I can put on some weight and can take it off as I please”… Why me? What was it with my body? why had it become the split body of my ideal slim body?… Why did I have to bother with the body if the world was full of wonder?

But later, why am I again presented with the issue of the diet? Why again? If I am behaving like I should, sticking to a diet, which from taking pounds off, was working just fine?… Why again the body, why?

… it is not the diet what is important… no, it is Body that is important….

That answer took its own sweet time to come, like the diamond. But what does it mean that Body is important?

That next breadcrumb gave me a hint… with high cholesterol levels the doctor told me: “you must lower your cholesterol if you want to live longer”… either my condition was genetic… or, at any rate, I would develop a heart condition in fifteen years or so.

Obediently as any ‘good’ person would, I bought the pills…. And as meticulous as I am sometimes, I read their side-effects… there, in small print, it read: ‘danger to develop a kidney condition in about 20 years’ …

Back to the doctor I went… I already had ‘a kidney condition’… The doctor said, ‘it is very difficult to do, but the other way to manage fat in the blood, is managing carbs in the diet. No carbs!’…

Ok, but the diet I had followed was one with few carbs… I was mystified. But even so, ‘following doctor’s orders’ I lowered the carbs even more. Over time, I naturally, and without any gain of weight nor cravings, not as before … slimmed further, dealing with smoke in the lungs… and without enough ‘body-mass’, came also the time for the ‘right measure’ of wine …

… slimmed further, dealing with smoke in the lungs… And without enough ‘body-mass’, came also the time for the ‘right measure’ of wine …(image: Caspar Hannes)

Still this was ‘the diet the doctor had given me’, though truth be told, it was in itself special, since a ‘no carbs diet’ is so difficult to keep up. But the point was how carbs came to symbolize fear and rage, frustration and impotence, pain and sorrow… because joy, real joy can only be found when the ‘body is at peace’…

Carbs are the sweets of foods; I learned that I am allergic to carbohydrates… My body ‘short circuits’ and cannot deal with sugars like a ‘normal’ body would. It goes out of control gaining weight he doesn’t want (I noticed how the body had stopped being an ‘it’). He would become sluggish, without energy, in every movement, in mind…

Eventually, I found sweetness in precisely that harmony… Body tells me when he wants a change of diet, and often even tells me what he doesn’t want to eat. As this dialogue improved we can enjoy ourselves together in movement and dance, walking or jogging, in the fullness of energy.

And because Body takes anything at hand to express itself, images, emotions, symptoms, and dreams, I began, with new vitality, to learn the language of psyche, symbolic language, its narratives and imaginings, and to embody that knowledge in the way I live. The grounding, the relation between the inner and outer experiences, this talking to the inner me… are all part of the diamond-diet, the axis of revolution and evolution of my life…